newcritics

One of the things that separates professional actors from the most talented amateurs is the quality of their voices.

Put the best community theater actress up against the screechiest starlet, the best local leading man up against the most mumbly son of a Brando, let them deliver the same soliloquies from Shakespeare, and while the amateurs’ deliveries might be more spot on, their readings of the lines more intelligent, when you listen to the professionals you’ll just hear more.

Partly through training and practice, partly through superior skill and talent, and partly through genetic luck, professionals can put more music into their lines. It’s the difference between plinking out a single note on a piano and playing a whole chord.

Somebody was listening closely when Brian De Palma was casting Redacted, De Palma’s fictional documentary about a rape and murder committed by American soldiers stationed in Iraq, or maybe De Palma and his sound engineer dialed all the right dials in the studio, or maybe the actors just used their superior vocal skills to flatten their voices, whatever the case, what’s most convincing about Readacted and sells it as a “documentary,” at least for the first half an hour, is that the actors don’t sound like actors.

It helps that most of the actors don’t look like movie stars either and that several of the actors playing soldiers have the kind of plain, bland, too young for the job they’re doing faces that show up in photographs of the troops in Iraq. But the movie’s gimmick—that we’re watching a documentary put together from snippets of film and video from several different sources, including a French documentary, Iraqi television news stories, streaming videos taken from web sites, and, mainly, one of the soldier’s own video camera—requires that the images we’re getting are either badly shot or only accidentally or incidentally focused on the main characters, we don’t ever really see the soldiers’ faces. Not the way we’re used to seeing actors’ faces in movies, at any rate. So we mainly get to know them, and learn to tell who’s who, through their voices and those voices sound real, which is to say bland, unmusical, and inadequate to expressing the feelings of these men.

It’s not enough to have the words. We need the feel the force of our own words. We need to be able to sing. This why we rely on professional actors and singers—we need them to give music to our thoughts and emotions so that we can feel them. Their inability to express themselves, to give music to their feelings and thoughts, is another frustration for the men, another area in which they can find no relief from their godawful situation.

The godawfulness of being in Iraq is something the first half of Redacted conveys very well. De Palma captures the ugliness of the war zone, the troops’ sense of being on an alien and hostile planet. He conveys the boredom, the exhaustion, and the growing paranoia and sense of futility. The soldiers talk big about what they’re doing for the Iraqis, but they know they are an occupying force, with no real mission except not to get killed by the people they’re supposed to be protecting, and as much as they resent and fear the Iraqis they have begun to hate and despise themselves. They didn’t join the Army to become prison guards. They didn’t think they were going over there to be flypaper. And they feel like chumps for having let themselves be conned that way and like dopes and cowards for not finding a way out of the mess they’re in.

De Palma made Redacted as an argument for getting out of Iraq and as long as his argument is that the occupation is demoralizing the Army and inducing self-loathing in a whole lot of decent young men, Redacted is an effective piece of artistic propaganda.

But when the actual plot kicks in and a story begins to unfold and then build to the rape and murders, the gimmick that made the first part of the film work collapses. De Palma didn’t find a convincing way to keep a camera “accidentally” on the men as they commit and then pay for their crimes but he couldn’t bring himself to just abandon the gimmick or step outside it either. What happens is that all at once his characters start acting like characters in a movie but the camera continues to act like it’s not being operated by an artist making a movie and the result is that Redacted stops feeling and looking and sounding like a real, professionally-made documentary about the war in Iraq and begins to feel and look and sound like an amateur documentary about the making of a movie called Redacted, one of those video diaries kept by actors or members of a film crew but without the offscreen goofing around.

Ironically, as well, at the point when the movie shifts more into the realm of art, of straight-forward storytelling, it becomes more didactic, more heavy-handed in its anti-war message. It becomes more propagandistic, but less effectively so.

The problem is that the rape and murders in this movie do not symbolize what we’re doing to Iraq the way the rape and murders symbolized the Vietnam War in De Palma’s Casualties of War.

In Casualties of War, which I think is the most frightening, the most human, and the best of the Vietnam movies made in the 70s and 80s, Sean Penn’s character, Sergeant Meserve, is a good soldier and, as far as we know, a good man ruined by the war and Michael J. Fox’s character, Private Eriksson is a good man overwhelmed by the war’s evil. Erikson is too weak to stop what’s happening because the situation is too far beyond one’s man strength to handle. The man he should be able to turn to for help, Meserve, has become his enemy. De Palma’s theme, that in Vietnam we had corrupted ourselves, become our own enemy as well as the enemy to people we were supposed to be helping, that we had let something loose within ourselves we didn’t have the strength to control or resist, is also a pretty generally agreed upon historical fact of the War.

In Redacted the rape and the murders have no symbolic resonance and make no particular comment on this War. It’s become obvious that in Iraq we are doing ourselves and the Iraqis much more harm than good but the crime in Redacted is just and only that, a crime. It isn’t caused by the war. It’s caused by a pair of sociopathic morons who almost certainly would have committed a very similar stupid and brutal crime in civilian life if the Army hadn’t been there for them to escape into. They don’t need the war to give them their excuse. They don’t need any excuse at all. They just need an opportunity.

And the “good” soldier who sets out to stop them and fails isn’t weakened by the situation. He’s just weak. And dumb. Eriksson couldn’t turn to anyone for help because he was far out in the jungle, alone with Meserve and his goons. Lawyer McCoy just needs to walk down the hall and holler for the MP s.

Instead he places too much faith in his own opinion of himself as a hero and sets out to put a stop to the crime and rescue the girl by himself. Actually, as a fictional character, McCoy is a potential contemporary Lord Jim, a hero in his own mind whose courage fails him at the moment when he should step up and act like a hero. Unfortunately for McCoy as a character, De Palma is pretty much through with him as soon as he fails to do the right thing. It’s as if Conrad had ended his novel with Jim’s jump. What we’re left with for the last act of the movie, then, is the story of two self-destructive assholes punching their own tickets to Leavenworth that De Palma expects us to somehow see as proof that we need to get the hell out of Iraq.

We need to get the hell out of Iraq, but the only argument against the war this story makes is that the war is bad because of the way it’s draining the military and forcing the Army to lower its recruiting standards.

Redacted Written and directed by Brian De Palma. Starring Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz, Patrick Carroll, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Kel O’Neill, and Ty Jones. Magnolia Pictures. 2007.

Originally posted at my place.